“Mapa Teatro. Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking Sanity” at Museo Reina Sofía Madrid

March 8, 2019

Founded in Paris in 1984 by Colombian theatre and visual artists Heidi, Elizabeth and Rolf Abderhalden, Mapa Teatro moved to Bogotá in 1986. Since its inception, this artists’ laboratory has developed its own cartography in the sphere of “living arts”, in a space which is conducive to transgressing borders — geographical, linguistic, artistic — and to staging local and global concerns by way of different devices and formats.

In its polyphonic work, Mapa Teatro traces a space of migrations with the displacement of the private and public spheres; artistic languages (theatre productions, actions, installations, urban interventions, opera, cabaret, sound pieces, radio and performance lectures; authors and eras; geography and language: the word, image and movement; the voice, music and sound processes; memory and the city; simulation and reality; document and fiction; poetics and politics.

Practical Information

This artists’ laboratory assembles myth, history and the present in the investigation of archives and documents, a departure point for them to build their own fictions. The Mapa Teatro project for the Museo Reina Sofía’s Fissures programme is directly linked to the past of the Museo’s building as Madrid’s General Hospital, whose construction was partly funded with gold from the Americas.

By way of an installation across two rooms – Space 1 and the Vaults Gallery — Mapa Teatro will create a fiction which alloys the funding of the hospital and its role as a temporary refuge for those who were then called “lunatics” the “insane”, and who were previously confined to the ground-floor rooms of today’s Museo.